Jugaad Time

In India, the practice of jugaadfinding workarounds or hacks to solve problemsemerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaadas both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressiveRai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.